10/1/2012

Eckstrom Consulting and The North West Montana Physician's Group to host a seminar on Meaningful Use and HIPAA Security for Ancillary medical providers. The seminar will cover what you need to know about Meaningful Use Stage 1 and Stage 2 as well as HIPAA Security from a technology perspective.If you are a Dentist, Podiatrist, Optometrist, Chiropractor or Physical Therapist you won't want to miss these presentations. We will be sending out invitations near the end of October.

Eckstrom Consulting is proud to announce the launch of our new website at http://www.eckstromconsulting.com. The goal of the new website is to make it easier for our existing clients to submit and manage support requests, and provide more information about our services for prospective clients.

Our current clients who can access our ticket client portal can now use their email and password to log into the site to make filling out forms easier, access special content, and gain access to our ticketing system.

We'd also like to welcome everybody to our blog, and we encourage you to leave comments.

Malware is now targeting your bank account and proprietary data!

How Secure is your Network?Are you at risk?It's time to get proactive.

A disturbing trend is emerging in Cyber-crime. Over the last few weeks, Eckstrom Consulting along with many others in the Information Technology industry have been confronted by new types of Malware Infections. This next generation of Malware Infections possesses the ability to be business killers in the right circumstances.

The Malware Infections have many names such as Virus, Spyware, Botnet, Trojan and Rootkit. The Malware Infections are designed by many different groups with different goals. The one consistent goal that is emerging is that they are designed to steal your money or intellectual property.

The Malware Infections achieve their goals by infecting your computer and stealing your valuable data and files while also attempting to capture bank account login information. Once the Malware has taken what it came for it will attempt to destroy files and or computers on the network and erase traces of it being there.

Your intellectual property and bank account logins are sold or exploited. We have seen examples of this behavior already in our practice. We have even heard of cases where the Malware Infection destroyed backup files.

Although these new Malware Infections have been highly effective, it appears that they are only clumsy first attempts at what the future of Malware attacks will look like. There is still time to take measures to protect your business but you need to act.

What you need to do:

1. Contact your bank and determine what policies and or insurance protections are in place for your bank account. Unlike credit cards which will not hold you responsible in the event of fraudulent purchases, bank accounts are generally not protected the same way. If money is stolen via an online transfer there is generally nothing that will be done. If your bank account does not have any protections in the event of a compromised username and password, we suggest that you have an account this is not available online.

2. Reduce the Attack Surface of your computer systems by following some very simple security best practices.

Patch computers and applications fully and frequently.

Maintain up to day antivirus software.

Think before you click. The malware infections are designed to take advantage of the biggest security vulnerability, You!

Backup, Backup and Backup. A solid Disaster Recovery plan might be your only protection against these threats.

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